Jerome Yoo's Mongrels explores immigrant experience through surreal imagery
Korean-born, B.C.-raised filmmaker’s Maple Ridge-shot first feature centres around a Korean family struggling with grief
Mongrels.
Mongrels screens at VIFF Centre from February 14 to 17 and 19, with a Q&A with the cast and crew at the February 16 5:15 pm screening
VANCOUVER DIRECTOR Jerome Yoo is well aware of the old warning that first-time-feature filmmakers should avoid two things: animals and children. But he manages to embrace both poetically in his new film Mongrels, the 1990s-set story of a Korean father who comes to Canada to help a rural community fend off wild dogs that have been killing farmers’ livestock. The new immigrant brings along a young daughter and teen son who are struggling with the unspoken grief around their mother’s recent death.
“I was just thinking about imagery: I wanted to express these misunderstood dogs in the forest that paralleled this immigrant family’s experiences,” Mongrels’ affable director-screenwriter tells Stir over Zoom from Korea, where his parents now live and where he’s been spending more and more time lately. “I saw an image with just a lot of dogs in the woods.”
Yoo was equally taken with another scene he envisioned early: one of a girl playing the Korean piri pipe instrument in the forest. “I was also inspired by the folk tale of the Pied Piper of Hamelin: it felt like such a striking image to see the daughter in colourful traditional Korean clothing in this fairy-tale woods,” Yoo relates of the sequence featuring breakout newcomer Sein Jin as Hana, the youngest in the on-screen family.
And so with a small army of dog handlers and mismatched mutts, he and his team headed to the fields, forests, and lakes around Maple Ridge to shoot his meditative, dreamlike feature. The film has a distinctive look, whether it’s mongrel dogs wandering through emerald-mossy rainforests or the family looking out over a vast, mountain-flanked lake.
“I really wanted to place the family’s hardship within this contrasting beautiful landscape,” Yoo explains. “It’s almost as if they’re struggling through this dream environment. So I thought it was just an interesting way to experience their grief, by placing these characters into a beautiful landscape. And with Maple Ridge, in such a small area, we have so much intermixing of all these different terrains.”
Mongrels already displays a distinct visual language. It’s a testament to Yoo’s artful eye, one the Korea-born, Coquitlam-raised talent developed after majoring in biochemistry at UBC and then finding his way to theatre and acting. In 2018, “Gong Ju”, his first short film, won several awards at the Vancouver Short Film Festival.
Jerome Yoo. Photo by Brian Van Wyk
Yoo’s acting background (his training includes the American Conservatory Theatre, the Beverly Hills Playhouse, and Vancouver Acting School) helps explain the nuanced performances he gets out of his actors in Mongrels–particularly Korean veteran Jae-Hyun Kim as Sonny, the remote father who is more comfortable as a dog whisperer than he is expressing love or grief with his children. Yoo tracked Kim down in the outskirts of Seoul, pulling the disillusioned actor out of retirement. He drew a lot from Kim’s experience in creating the character who’s grappling with loss, with language barriers, and with holding his household together—so much that he turns to alcohol and starts to break down mentally. In one striking, feverish image from the film, Sonny lies in the fetal position on the forest moss, surrounded by dogs.
“For someone to have a lot of pride and then coming over here and losing their voice: there’s this feeling of losing power, losing status,” Yoo reflects. “You know, I think in Sonny's world there’s so much grief, so much disconnect from family, so much disconnect from reality, and with this new environment around him, it almost makes him drink and act irrationally. At times when the body is under so much stress, when mentally you’re going through so much torment, you start behaving in erratic ways—almost animalistic ways—to kind of try and relieve yourself of this tension.”
The filmmaker allows that the dreamlike, surreal sequences in his films, offer an escape from that stressful reality—an external portal away from the internal grief.
In some ways, that experience reflects the one he’s having now in Korea—a country that has embraced Mongrels, and where he’s hoping to do more film projects. Yoo grew up speaking mostly English, and his time in chilly February Seoul is reminding him of what it’s like to struggle to express oneself in a new land.
“In Korea, I feel like there's a layer of cultural politeness that I have to exude. And of course, I have the vocabulary of, like, a third grader in Korea. So I find that I just can't be as expressive here,” he says. “For people that have language barriers, for immigrants—they feel so small, compared to when they're back home, because they don't know whether they can take up space, whether they can really be who they are. I kind of feel the same way in Korea right now.” 
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